Maxim Bours co-founded Huispedia in 2018, after he and co-founder Ramon, both then working in IT at KLM, each tried to buy a house and found a Dutch market where listings were well served but decision-making was not. Eight years on, the company calls itself a data intelligence platform rather than a portal. It carries agents' listings for free, takes no advertising money from agents, and charges consumers a subscription instead.

That model is why it can do something almost no listings site does. Huispedia sits on the buyer's side. It tells people when an asking price has been set deliberately low as a bidding tactic, and its coach will advise you not to view a house, or not to bid at all. Ed has been arguing for months that portals need to move towards the buyer. Huispedia is already there, and this conversation is about what that costs and what it makes possible.

Simon Baker works through the mechanics: where the listings come from, how an automated valuation model builds a flywheel the way Zillow and Zoopla once did, what churn looks like when a buyer becomes an owner, and why a portal whose revenue depends on selling leads to agents cannot follow Huispedia without biting the hand that feeds it.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:43 Founding Huispedia in 2018
03:32 What makes the Dutch housing market an outlier
05:54 Free listings, subscriptions and why Huispedia isn't a portal
07:59 Inside Huispedia Plus and the personal coach
12:01 Where the listings come from, and the valuation flywheel
18:27 Renovation scenarios and the data they unlock
21:34 What Huispedia does with the data it collects
25:18 Freemium conversion and hitting the paywall
27:15 Churn when a buyer becomes an owner
31:49 Why aren't Dutch agents complaining?
36:24 Should portals become independent buyer advisers?
39:47 Why lead-generation portals can't follow
43:44 Lessons from eight years on the buyer's side

In this week's news roundup, regulators and courts take centre stage: REA Group settles with the ACCC, a Chicago judge hands MRED and Compass a win over Zillow, Hemnet's activist investors reshape the board and pause the buyback, and Schibsted appears to be lining up to take on its own former marketplaces business in Norway.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:34 REA Group Signs ACCC Undertaking Over Listing Clauses
13:38 Are Regulators Cracking Down On Portal Pricing?
17:39 Zillow Loses Injunction Bid Against MRED & Compass
23:35 Who Portals Really Serve: Buyers & Sellers
29:54 Hemnet Pauses Buyback After Board Shake-up
33:20 Why Hemnet's New Board Went Local
38:03 Can Hemnet's Share Price Recover?
40:20 Schibsted Media, Polaris & Amedia Team Up To Take On Finn
48:00 Vend At PPW Madrid & Wrap

REA Group Vs ACCC
On 14 September Australia's competition regulator accepted a court enforceable undertaking from REA Group over contract terms that, between 2013 and 2025, required or rewarded agencies for listing all or most of their properties on realestate.com.au. From 1 January 2027 agencies can move at least 25% of eligible listings to cheaper tiers, and the undertaking runs for three years. REA stressed there was no finding of wrongdoing. Simon explains why agents such as BresicWhitney want to hold listings back for their own sites, why this is marketing fuel for CoStar-owned Domain, and why rising portal costs against falling sales volumes mean regulators from Switzerland to Sweden and Spain are taking a closer look.

Zillow Vs MRED
A US judge has refused Zillow a preliminary injunction in its Sherman Act case against Chicago MLS MRED and Compass, and ended the temporary order that restored Zillow's listings feed. In the court's words, transparency is not, standing alone, a goal of the antitrust laws, and opacity is not an anticompetitive effect. Harvey read all 54 pages so you don't have to (selected quotes are on onlinemarketplaces.com), and Simon takes it back to basics: the buyer and the seller are the only essential parties, and a portal that loses listings loses relevance.

Hemnet Vs Buyback
An extraordinary general meeting called by Vor Capital and Sprints Capital replaced most of Hemnet's board, with former REA and Rightmove executives making way for directors with deep Swedish market experience. The share buyback has been paused, with around SEK 189m already spent, as Hemnet enters what it calls a transformative phase. Simon, who has sat on boards on both sides of that debate, explains why local knowledge wins, why an 80% share price fall will take many quarters to recover from, and why "transformative" probably means an acquisition.

Schibsted Vs Schibsted?!
Schibsted Media, Polaris and Amedia have formed an equal three-way joint venture that looks set to take on Vend's Finn in Norwegian classifieds. Simon on why starting from zero against a dominant number one is so hard, the three-headed dog problem of media joint ventures, and why Vend should keep an eye on it without letting it become an anchor.

The PPW Conference is in Madrid from 28 to 30 October. Get your tickets at ppweurope.com.

Presented by:
• Edmund Keith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-keith/
• Harvey Hancock: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvey-hancock/
• Simon Baker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stbaker/

Simon Baker and Harvey Hancock are joined by Christian Schwarz Lausten, founder and CEO at Landfolk, for a peek behind the curtain of an increasingly AI-first vacation rentals marketplace that has expanded from its native Nordics into Europe, including a proprietary AI intelligence layer called PAX...

00:00 intros

00:54 What is Landfolk?

07:25 Context, Business model and monetisation

13:31 Awareness, engagement, and bookings for the properties?

20:20 AI at Landfolk, and introducing PAX

24:42 AI goosebumps and AI Trustability

34:18 Christian's question for Simon